I'd like to think of the blare of feedback from the Beatles's "I Feel Fine" as a starting point, but it only shows how ahistorical I am. The relatively short history of music recording featured musicians and engineers that progressively obsessed over fidelity of reproduction, who only later learned to embrace the imperfect. Or, as the title of the eLpH vs Coil album put it, Worship The Glitch: the point being to incorporate those "imperfections" -- or, to flout the fidelity to the real -- and enfold them into the musical text itself.
Vinyl was of course an imperfect medium in and of itself; the first DJs who included the snap and crackle of scratchy records in their samples were well aware of this. Both Grandmaster Flash and Christian Marclay took that imprecision further, deforming and disrupting the original intention and meaning of the records by scratching, looping and weaving the musical passages into entirely different contexts. Since then, "glitch house," "electroglitch" and its other monikers have spawned entire CD-R spindles worth of music.
(On another parallel plane, folks like John Cage and the "composers" of Surrealist musics before him welcomed the aleatory, and the possibility of including the "imperfect" and dissonant as well.)
The advent of the digital compact disc changed all that; quibbles about the coldness of the sound aside, the CD was as close to perfect fidelity as possible. Its vaunted indestructability was such that sales people would step on a disc and play them for prospective customers; the high prices -- sadly, even now -- made the dreaded skip sound even worse. (It's easier for your ears to fill in the spaces between vinyl pops, or to treat tape hiss as background noise, but for a skipping CD you have little choice but to skip to the next track.)
This is why Oval's 1995 94diskont album still remains a landmark. The centerpiece of the album, the almost 30-minute "Do While," is a gorgeous epic of skipping discs, with clicks and loops mutating and shifting as if underwater, producing an unearthly warmth from digital coldness, generating an unsettled, unsteady peace out of machine chaos. It simply blew my mind the first time I heard it. (The track below is a shorter version entitled "Do While (Command X)" -- it's not really "command," because it's the symbol for the Apple key, but I couldn't reproduce it.)
Hear it (6.98 mb).
Posted by the wily filipino at June 6, 2004 07:30 AM